


On Artistic Temperaments

by uber_marionette



Category: Homestuck
Genre: (yes), DirkJake Week, Dissociation, M/M, The Bro Daki, The Homestuck Epilogues, The Homestuck Epilogues: Meat, abuse of the Gettier problem, and anchor your reality to him, but nothing too explicit, depersonalisation, derealisation, fellas is it gay to pine for an unrealised ideal of another man, outside of some visuals involving Michelangelo's David, people get so creative with these tags and I am not, suggestive imagery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-13
Updated: 2021-01-13
Packaged: 2021-03-17 15:15:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,941
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28727199
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/uber_marionette/pseuds/uber_marionette
Summary: Join Dirk Strider in his room on the Theseus for a peek into.... uh... let's call it his "creative process." There's gay pining, ontological doublethink, an uncomfortable truth about Michelangelo's statue of David, a touch of extremely hypocritical art advice, and a really intense minute there where he gets entirely distracted by the meta-real existence (or lack thereof) of Jake English's left hand. It's fine. Don't worry about it.
Relationships: Jake English/Dirk Strider
Comments: 10
Kudos: 28
Collections: DirkJake Big Bang 2k21





	On Artistic Temperaments

The Theseus, as I have unilaterally christened this ignominious reminder of Jake's poor grasp of reality (not to mention his deficits when it comes to preplanning), is simply another interminable and yet temporary form of confinement whose confines I am uniquely suited to endure. 

Not that I'm claiming to be enjoying it. 

But neither am I as neatly 'contained' by it as my childhood chambers above the sea. As with most things, the specifics of that are rooted in the game and its design. And by 'design,' I mean as a concept executed on multiple levels. There's the game's design as a narrative tool, of course. The metatextual and in-text purposes and mechanisms of its utilisation. Both write large and in a more precise, character-focused fashion. Tools using tools making tools to create tools. 

These are the things I have to think about, as I ready this narrative for its ascension to something truly worth reading. 

Drawing is a comfortable mundanity during this taxing period. It's not like I really have three years. It's more like one year, stretched into three by the rigorous demands of continuity. It will be further warped, I know, by the extenuation of my narrative circumstances, as 'updates' march on relentlessly and the non-linear events and perspectives thus unveiled proceed apace. 

Besides, it's easier for me to think if I keep myself occupied. Preferably with other ideas and activities. I could say something about the mind unattended by its own scrutiny, not that I have ever made the mistake of leaving my own thoughts unattended. Nor would I. Nor should I. Nor _could_ I. Which is exactly why the visual arts are the perfect medium for unscrutinised production, while the more intimately meaningful work occurs elsewhere. Don't get the wrong idea: my feelings are sealed off tighter than David's unsculpted asshole, his unassailable sphincter hidden for all eternity between two furiously clenched marble glutes. Whatever deeper emotional meaning you're digging into this prosaic exercise in applied illustration for is locked up in baggage, a section that this developmentally-nightmarish excuse for a vehicle is quite notably missing. 

This is strictly the psychofantasy detritus I'm shedding in the process of germinating _new_ content. A new future for reality. A canon so ripe and meaty that I'm salivating just thinking about it. 

Man. I can't fucking wait. 

Still.

There are only so many keystone characters and themes in this tortuous chain of cascading artistic mistakes called 'canon' that can hold my interest for longer than a few penstrokes--believe me, I've tried. Repeatedly. It's not that I can't do it, obviously. I can do anything I choose, if I put my mind to it. It's just that 'putting my mind to' a task intended to free my ascended consciousness from the remaining wisps of visible association that tether my Self to the specificity of my physical "self" in this timeline.... well, that just defeats the whole goddamn purpose. 

Wow. Here I was, so eager to get to the good shit that I was about to keep going without talking about what anything in this room looks like? Embarrassing. Sloppy. Amateur. No, we're doing this right. Pull that invisible camera back a bit, really take it in. The posters are hand-selected for maximum visual impact and sustainability as a source of personal enrichment during this long and tedious journey. And look at that. A genuine piece of history. That's official merchandise right there, the one and only fully licensed dakimakura of yours truly. 

The resemblance is uncanny, isn't it? You just don't even know what I went through to get ahold of one of these bad boys. It's a real visual treat, too. From the evocative insouciance of the posing to the smuppet being crushed so evocatively between those denim-wrapped thighs. 

I like to think of it as my Whitesona. 

Not that it's exactly white any more. I'm not trying to overshare, but I will admit that it's no longer mint; I swear that's only because I had to tint it pink for thematic purposes, though. (And it was definitely on purpose, so don't get it twisted; a full 2/3 of this ship is occupied by grown adults who know how to do laundry). I think it does more than simply enhance the obvious connections, personally. There's some real artistic metacommentary to be made with it. 

Oh, don't tell me you're getting spooked already. Look. I know you believe this to be a sudden digression into some lewdly revelatory details of my solo adventures in sexuality. But I'm telling you it's not. Nothing of the sort. I'd reserve the right to be offended myself if I didn't accept this uncharitable assumption as the inevitable side effect of my own willingness to share the heretofore unplumbed depths of my character in order to supply you, the reader, with entertainment and edification both. Seriously, though. Did you know sleeping with a pillow between your knees is good for your back? It's true. That whole pelvic and lumbar region really benefits from it.

I consider it every bit as essential a part of my basic quality-of-life as the kotatsu I'm using to warm those physical extremities of mine not currently in use. It took so many fucking steps to make this thing, and I had to give up on a higher-tech concept in favour of the clearly-superior traditional and classic form, but it's worth every bit of the aggravation I put us all through for it. It makes a swell drafting surface, too. I could work here for hours. In fact, I do. That’s what I’m doing right now. See? Brought that one right back around, slick as anything. No sweat.

The trick to art is not getting too fixated on the end result. Not that the finished product isn't the ultimate sum of all your labours, the cumulative declaration of your accomplishments to that point and the final arbiter of your work's (and some might even say your own) value. It absolutely is. And forgetting that is tantamount to creative suicide. But in the moment, as you're moving your hand, and you're making those lines, and you're _visualising_ , you have to focus on that vision. Or rather, your body does. The mechanical feature of your transcendent urge to _create_ needs to focus on that vision. My hand. "My" hand. My "hand." Moves the pen. By its function, a symbolic representation of form. Crude shapes evocative of a physicality recognisable only foreknowledge of iconography further abstracted from the 'real.' 

Take, for example, these lips. 

I'm just kidding. I'm not drawing any lips. That would be a weird fucking place to start. Imagine if I did that to you. Started out broadly discussing the work I'm undertaking, then redirect you to the pen in my hand and the paper on on my kotatsu, treating you to a crash-course in the artificiality of 'art' as a vehicle for expression even of commonly established 'reality,' and then really zoomed in further to make an example of what I'm drawing while I think all of this, and then it's a pair of lusciously puckered lips, ready to... well, I'll leave what those lips would be doing up to your imagination. Because I'm not drawing them. 

Not right now, anyway. Right now, I'm drawing a hand. Which is interesting. I watch my hand, which is to you invisible and to me inescapable, but whose details are known to you only by the context I give it, move an implement whose path outlines a hand this is to you invisible and to me recognisable only by the context in which its form exists, and known to you only by the language with which it is described. I could tell you it looks like anything. You would still recognise it. 

And yet the hand I remember looks nothing like this hand. The level of skill required to detail any one perfectly rendered iteration of this hand would be a feat for the great masters themselves, or else some unhailed online artist in the heart of Appalachia with twelve followers who works exclusively in coal dust. To produce a hand that could encapsulate every hand--every iterative, consecutive, nonlinear existence of this (non)specific left hand across and within Paradox Space--is impossible. Even the most picosecond-perfect reproduction of a single iterative copy of Jake English's left hand would be every bit as inadequate to that true reality of this hand as a simple circle drawn on the end of a curved line. 

Which is what I've drawn. Because, quite frankly, the idea of trying anything more 'accurate' exhausts me. 

It's all going to be wrong anyway. The reality that I know is not 'real' in a single layer of itself, but I can at least let it be wrong in a stylistically indisputable and notionally truthful way. 

But I can't stop picturing that hand. The individual hairs on the back of it, where it leads into the wrist. Hairs that are sometimes black, sometimes brown, sometimes white or grey. Sometimes they are fine, but more often it grows thick and robust, a densely-packed evolutionary holdover coming to your tactile senses in real 3D, on the arm of a man evolution never had a hand in creating. All of these hands and all of these fingers and all of these wrists and all of these individual hairs existing simultaneously and concurrently and discretely, layer upon layer in an unstratified concentration of its own existence. Not just the Platonic ideal of "Jake's left hand," but something beyond that. A Platonic _reality_. Imagine knowing that. Imagine knowing the ideal Form of a man's left hand. You can't. It's impossible. For you. But it exists. 

It exists, the sublime Form of the Ultimate left hand of Jake English. 

It exists, and I cannot touch it. 

Because it isn't real. 

But it exists, and I know it intimately. 

It's not enough to describe them, to wax poetic about how the thick pads of his calloused heel and thumb are smoothed by gun oil, and there's no other way for those hands to be. No matter how many moisturising lotions he buys and uses twice before leaving it to expire in some medicine cabinet or locker somewhere, no matter how many other items he touches--what oblong meat objects he cradles in his palm, be they culinary or otherwise; what guts he buries his hand in, be they robotic or organic. The weight of one hand in another, of a gun gripped tight, of a face cupped gently, the sharp _clap_ of success, of two hands connecting midair as two men celebrate with the highest of fives. 

None of that is real. 

Is this circle real? Is this circle a hand? Is that hand the circle is, or is not, itself real? 

It's not simply a question of witness, this fundamental disconnect between events. The internal witness, the external witness. The internal reality. The external reality. The reality that is, and that is not. 'Alienating?' No, that's too loaded a word. Heartbreaking? Only if you want to be real melodramatic about it. Personally, I think of it as a particularly tortuous kind of epiphany, the metafictional ordeal of being slowly unspooled into one's component atoms as you're pulled through a black hole. 

It is a cumulative form of pressure from a first-person perspective, to experience the answer to that question. And then again to experience it in the moment. And to keep experiencing it, off and on as weeks and months and years themselves accumulate in the temporal hole of 'wasn't it just Tuesday yesterday?' 

I study my right hand to draw his left. There's a lesson there, if you look for it. The left hand doesn't know what the right is doing, so the saying goes. 

Philosophically, it's just one more interaction of the metafictional strata with experiential abstractions. A bastardisation of what's known as the Gettier problem. Knowledge, what can be defined as genuinely knowing something, is not the simple sum of a series of logical conclusions. A justified true belief does not constitute knowledge, and the extrapolation of Jake’s selfhoods, his hands, his touch and his feel, his fictional and realistic existences, from my own cumulative experiences and analysis is not knowledge of it or him. The transitive property of Jake’s ‘Jake’ness is insufficient proof. The corporeal specificity of him is insufficient. And maybe it was getting to me. A lot of things were getting to me, because I was the only point at which they could converge. I know him. I _know_ him. And I tried, I fucking tried. The meat of the body isn't the meat that matters, though. No matter how painstakingly sculpted or lusciously muscled or willingly given. And it's not that I no longer found satisfaction in the things that once felt vital, or that I thought nourished me in the pursuit some vague selfish notion of self-actualisation. The artistically and aesthetically sublime perfection of Big Bugs up there still appeals to me, and so remains part of my rich personal buffet of character conceits. But the meat, the _meat_ of the matter, a term which I again invoke both facetiously and purposefully, is that the heart, too, is a muscle. And it too can be cannibalised. Remember that. And don't say I didn't warn you. 

But I thought I had him. My right hand, I Gabriel and he Michael and together we'd have conquered Love. All handedness aside, it's obvious that I'd be Gabriel, 'who is over Paradise and the serpents and the Cherubim.' Probably Gabriel didn't have a katana, but no one's asked a rabbi to prove he didn't. If you're going to give an angel a sword, then it might as well be a katana. 

So what if this symbolic hand reaches up to the handsome jaw of a circle representing another's head, or that hand is placed bracingly against the ribcage of a torso, bare? Are these details real? Predictive? Recollective? What if a hand with fingers resting millimetres away touches another hand? What about two hands, their fingers interlocking? What if two circles are drawn adjacent? What if they're drawn overlapping? When does the Left Hand of God descend from outside of that contained reality and prove its immaterial nature, crushing the illusion of reality into a ball and brushing it aside, disproving any belief in the potential of mere shape or form? 

That's the question I grapple with as I start over on a new piece of paper. This isn't pathological. The rote performance of compliance--of _happiness_ is itself a crime against reality. Fiction. Happy endings. That's how they get you. The shiny veneer of promise, of potential. Points of light peppering the yawning abyss of metareality, puncturing a fantastical visage of happiness you actually start to believe in.

I know, you're probably sick of me feeding you these hamfisted metaphors, of me just shovelling this meta into your mouth hand over fist, reams of words piling into the three and a half pounds of fat and electricity inside your skull, a dog's breakfast gobbling up this prose. I know I am. Let's get to picturing something new. Some _real_ art. Like if Michelangelo graced us with anything worth jacking it to. You with me? 

Heads all start out the same basic shape as a hand here, but it's the intent that matters, _intent_ which guides the shape from flat circle to something implied to contain not merely a skull but a mind, wearing not just the visual suggestion of human-like features but human-like meaning. The arms I'm adding now? Meant to bear not just the weight of another man's form but the power of tenderness. The eyes? Ensconced in their rectangular casement, gaze uplifted to grace that man with a look of genuine devotion. All of this is real, which is to say, it isn't. But to be specifically represented and to exist in that specificity are two different conditions. This specific Jake isn't real. But neither is Dirk, not in the specific. So any Jake I draw is as real as I am. That's how this works. 

Wait. No. 

I mean. Yes, the thing I just said is definitely true. 

But this picture? Nope. Not doing it for me. New page. Same me, different Jake. Our roles are reversed. His shaking form is held steady in my arms, his eyes wet and pleading. Except I fucked up that eye. Hang on. Same picture, take two. I have a slightly better idea for this one now, anyway. Let's close those eyes of his, draw droplets of wetness at the corners of them... extract some pathos from this imagery, that's the shit. What's he crying about? Why are you so goddamn nosy? I told you that this doesn't mean anything, remember? I know this was roughly two thousand words ago, but come the fuck on. This isn't even a new concept. The picture, I mean. I don't think he figured it out at the time. What I meant when I said I wasn't coming back. Maybe that's what went fucking wrong. I can't go back and write the answers inside his head, but if I could... okay, you know what? I've changed my mind. I can't work like this. Your rubbernecking is pretty distracting and I have shit to do. Like, literally anything. I have not gotten anything done since I let you in on this. So that's it. Show's over. Get out. I mean it. 

Scram. 

And remember: no matter what you think you read? 

You never saw anything.

**Author's Note:**

> I have a lot of thoughts, feelings, and passionate opinions about Dirk and Jake in the Epilogues.... these two could not find their own asses with both hands free and the lights on but they'd trust the other one to find their ass for them. In fact, this was originally 6k words long and then I trimmed literally half of it because (while the 'meat' of it was definitely more in Epilogues style) the actual ship content was spaced out more as well, and I was afraid it wouldn't be obviously shippy enough. 
> 
> So let me be clear: DirkJake real and they both hang onto that in their hearts even when their heads are convinced otherwise. 
> 
> Anyway, big shout out to Rads for hosting this Big Bang in 2021! I've never participated in a Fandom Activity (TM) before and I'm really glad to have gotten the chance for this especially!


End file.
